Good News for the Planet = Bad News for Climate Alarmists

Contact: Richard Morrison, 202-331-2273

Washington, D.C., January 31, 2007—Advance details of the United Nations’ latest report on global warming are already sending mixed signals to scientific observers around the world. While the study is expected to predict climate impacts significantly less dramatic than previous reports, some long time alarmists have begun to attack the report itself as flawed and bureaucratically timid.

This week will see the release of the advance summary of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, an extensive review of the current science surrounding the global warming debate, involving the collaboration of hundreds of scientists over the course of several years.

“The full IPCC Fourth Assessment Report won’t become available for five or six months from now. Instead, the 20-some page Summary for Policymakers is being released,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute Director of Energy & Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell. “The Summary for Policymakers is designed to be a propaganda document that will promote global warming alarmism. It is not written by the scientists who wrote the report, but by the governments that belong to the IPCC.”

Despite the alarmist-leaning nature of the Summary for Policymakers, the underlying science from the full report itself will predict climate change impacts over the next century more modest than previous reports, and far below claims made by organizations and individuals predicting imminent catastrophic changes.

“The IPCC panel will find on Friday less projected temperature rise and less predicted sea level rise than it did in 2001. That isn’t good enough for those who want to break the back of the world’s energy system, so they have to attack it,” said CEI Senior Fellow Iain Murray. “For years, global warming alarmists built up ‘the consensus of scientists’ as the answer to legitimate concerns of climate skeptics. Now that they have seemingly successfully shut skeptical voices out of the debate on global warming, they have embarked on a process of delegitimization of that very consensus.”

Global Warming Experts Available for Interviews